Produced by Zone3 (After the Flood, Infoman) and magnificently directed by Guillaume Beaudoin, this 10-episode documentary series shows the different faces of contemporary Africa. Columnist and host Raed Hammoud (Where are you, Youssef?, Ethnic Immigrants) travels to the continent’s major cities to meet young people who are shaping its future, through artistic, environmental, social and scientific initiatives. In the first episode, we rediscover the Democratic Republic of Congo, through Kinshasa, its capital, which has 17 million inhabitants. Later this fall, the series will transport us to Dakar, Senegal, Douala, Cameroon, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Produced by Sphere Media, the Quebec production house behind Cerebrum and Aller Simple, this adaptation of an autobiographical play by Vivek Shraya is full of delicious discomfort. Featuring eight short episodes of 7 to 11 minutes, How to Fail as a Popstar chronicles the desperate quest of a young queer boy from an immigrant family in Edmonton to “become the Brown Madonna, win Grammys and fill stadiums.” We like the many nods to old radio hits from the 1990s (Finally, by CeCe Peniston, Black Velvet, by Alannah Myles), as well as (sometimes forgotten) artists of the time, like Marcy Playground, Treble Charger and Alanis Morissette.
After Sex and the City, That ’70s Show and Will and Grace, a new series from the 1990s is coming out of the mothballs: Frasier. Did we really need a platform to resurrect this Cheers spinoff sitcom? Probably not. But after the horror of And Just Like That and company, this revival can hardly do worse. Taped in front of a live audience at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, new episodes of Frasier portray the famous psychiatrist as he returns to Boston in hopes of realizing old dreams. In addition to Kelsey Grammer, Jack Cutmore-Scott, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Toks Olagundoye appear in the credits.
On September 23, 1993, Radio-Canada broadcast the first episode of Blanche, the long-awaited (but very different) sequel to Les Filles de Caleb, which had broken ratings records a few years earlier. Has the television adaptation of Arlette Cousture’s novel starring Pascale Bussières aged well? Short answer: yes. And not just because it doesn’t include any “blackface” scenes. Finely produced by Charles Binamé, this miniseries recounts the journey of Blanche Pronovost, the furiously independent daughter of Émilie and Ovila, at the heart of the 1920s and 1930s. Spoiler alert: we still haven’t digested Marie’s death -Louise (Pascale Montpetit).